When U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in Burma on Nov. 19, locals lined the streets, waving American flags that a couple years ago could have landed them in jail. “For many years, the U.S. flag meant defiance against the regime,” says Thiha Saw, a newspaper editor in Rangoon, the country’s largest city, where Obama spent six hours. “It meant democracy, freedom, all those good things.”

Two years ago, when China’s Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in the country known officially as Myanmar, there was no such spontaneous outpouring of goodwill from the Burmese people. After all, China may be one of Burma’s top foreign investors, but it was also one of the few nations to support an isolated military government as it brutalized its people. Even as Burmese rely on cheap Chinese imports, there is little love for their giant neighbor to the north.

China’s global outreach has been spurred by its search for natural resources needed to power its economy. Chinese state-owned companies have descended across the globe, from Africa to the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, bringing the kind of foreign investment that had dried up after the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union vied to woo governments to their sides. But even as the Chinese have signed contracts with some of the world’s more unsavory governments, the benefits from this foreign investment boom have tended not to trickle down to locals. Chinese usually bring their own work crews to staff foreign projects, and the tapped natural resources, of course, are for Chinese consumption.

Burma is a case in point. The country boasts a treasury of natural resources that the Chinese crave, from hydropower and timber to natural gas and jade. The military junta that ruled Burma for nearly five decades inked major investment deals with the Chinese, then among the few players in town because Western nations had slapped sanctions on the regime for its human-rights abuses. Under the reign of junta chief Than Shwe, Burmese generals and their business cronies grew rich from these Chinese contracts, even as one-third of Burmese lived under the poverty line—this in a country that used to be Asia’s rice basket. “The Myanmar people’s mindset is that Than Shwe was selling Myanmar to China,” says Hla Maung Shwe, vice-president of the Myanmar Chamber of Commerce. “The Chinese come here, even their cooks, their drivers, they are all Chinese. This is not the right way. Resentment against China is growing in Myanmar.”

Complicating matters is the fact that much of Burma’s natural bounty is located in its borderlands, where ethnic minorities already feel marginalized by the central government. Take the Shwe pipeline, which will dispatch energy from Burma’s far west to the interior of China, even though the resident ethnic Arakanese enjoy little electricity despite proximity to major natural-gas fields. (Burma is one of the least electrified countries in the world, particularly in ethnic areas.) “How can we send all this gas to China when the Arakanese almost have no electricity?” asks Phyo Phyo, an ethnic Arakanese who works for Shwe Gas Movement civic group, which monitors the country’s largest foreign investment project to date. “Our people are not getting the benefits. Instead, the project leaves fishermen with no livelihood and farmers with no land.”

Now, with the country led by a hybrid military-civilian government that has introduced various democratic reforms since assuming power in March 2011, China is finding it must compete with other countries eager to capitalize on an emerging investment destination. Last year, in a warning signal to the Chinese, President Thein Sein, a retired general who has helmed the country’s surprising opening, suspended construction on the Myitsone dam in the country’s north, a mega-project that would have sent nearly all the generated electricity to China, leaving locals literally in the dark. (There are, however, reports that some building is quietly going on at the Myitsone site in Kachin state, where the Burmese army has been clashing for months with ethnic Kachin rebels.)

With the increasingly liberal environment in Burma, locals are speaking out more forcefully against Chinese projects. Not far from the city of Monywa, thousands of Burmese have rallied against what they say are illegally seized or inadequately compensated land that will be used for a copper mine partly owned by a subsidiary of a Chinese weapons-maker. Protests broke out most recently while Obama was in Burma. Some of the country’s most high-profile former political prisoners have joined the cause, which includes worries about the mine’s environmental impact.

One of the winners in Burma’s populist push against China? The U.S., which has eased its sanctions against the new government. Despite the former junta’s xenophobia against the West, the U.S. generally enjoys respect from the Burmese people, who associate the country with democratic ideals. That affection aligns nicely with Obama’s recent foreign-policy pivot toward Asia. Throughout the continent’s Southeast Asian flank, regional governments are struggling to balance a hunger for Chinese investment with concerns over Beijing’s increasingly aggressive territorial ambitions in various maritime disputes.

At the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which President Obama attended after his Burma stop, interference by the host, Cambodia’s long-ruling strongman Hun Sen, helped guarantee that the gathered Southeast Asian nations did not confront China on the South China Sea tensions. Cambodia’s No. 1 investor and donor? China, which has allowed Hun Sen to flout the human-rights concerns to which Western donors would tie their aid. (China says its foreign policy and aid program is based on non-interference in other nations’ internal affairs.)

The Summit brought together the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) along with a host of other countries including China and the U.S. Yet even those ASEAN members with a territorial beef with China are wary of angering Beijing by encouraging Washington. At the Summit, President Benigno Aquino III of the Philippines, a close American ally, pointedly noted that his country had “the inherent right to defend its national interests” and to go “international.” That meant involving organizations such as the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Indeed, in contrast with Beijing, which wants to deal bilaterally with the other claimants, the U.S. has urged precisely such a multilateral approach. Aquino got little traction, however. For one thing, not every ASEAN government has a stake in the South China Sea disputes. For another, not just Cambodia owes China. Immediately after the Summit, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao dropped by Bangkok, where Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra asked for Beijing’s help in building a deep-sea port. As David Kang, a professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California, recently wrote, “East Asian countries are seeking a pathway that avoids taking sides.”

In Burma, too, the reformist leadership has taken pains not to alienate China. After all, Beijing was a key ally of the junta—some of whose retired members still rule the nation—when few other nations were willing to stand by the army leaders. Before Thein Sein visited the U.S. in September for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, he made sure to pop by China for a visit to a trade fair. “Myanmar is at present in a transitional phase, but it pays great attention to developing relations with China,” Thein Sein said while in southern China, according to state Chinese news agency Xinhua. “Its policy of seeing China as a true friend has not changed.”

Similarly, shortly before Obama began his much lauded Burma tour, Soe Win, the deputy commander of the Burmese military was in Beijing reaffirming military ties between the two nations. But the news galvanizing the international military community had nothing to do with Burma and China. Next year, Burma may well observe U.S. military exercises in Asia, a stunning turnaround for an armed forces schooled for so long on hatred of America. China, which considers the U.S. exercise to be taking place practically in its backyard, won’t be invited.

Cambodia is becoming a Chinese stooge. The Chinese are using the 2B-tactics (bribery and bullying) combined with their basic 2Y-strategy (Yuan and Y-chromosomes) in order to split up ASEAN (a rather facile trick which the Chinese believe Sun-Tzu “invented” lol). China needs “Lebensraum” and natural resources. Southeast Asia is viewed by the Chinese as a cheap takeaway kitchen populated by “Untermenschen” happy to be ruled and dominated by the Great Han Civilisation.

As an ethnic Chinese, I often feel Chinese don't really understand that their repressed society and political system are nothing people would like to admire. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) shamelessly uses nationalism to bolster its legitimacy. Indeed China's economic success is unquestionably coveted by many around the globe, but its business practices, treatment of worker and hugely unequal distribution of income blemish the sheen of economic success unsparingly. When and where a Chinese business, privately-owned or state-controlled, moves abrooad, it unconsciously or subconsciously brings all its flaws with it in spite of good intention, or lack of good intention, Consequently they are NOT earning a lot of love and respect. I don't think they know why. In a society where one has to always follow the official story or go to jail, its citizens develop a proclivity to not self-reflect and to not self-examine.

I am not saying Chinese businesses are thoroughly bad. In fact their success obviously demonstrates acumen and resourcefulness. CCP has had many successes of economic development and a gigantic success of being feared by its pople. The Party has yet to learn how to be loved.

Beijing authority's outreach policies inspired huge numbers of companies overseas , especially the small and undeveloped nations in Asia and Africa. Surely benefited locals and themselves for the employment and economy . But one point , no matter where the chiese firm went, can't get along with the local well ,there were many conflicts between the Chinese employers and local employees . There are a lot of causes for those disagreements such non respect to local customs, low payments, bad working benefit and environments. One point should be reminded here, the situations all local workers complained are worse inside china , I mean the domestic firms inland.

There is one thing that a lot of Americans and many Burmese, not tomention many other freedom-loving "rugged individualists"(Han-Solo-types) in the world have in common: "Angst vor China"(China-Angst) or more dramatically: Death by China as in P. Navarro'sand G. Autry's book. Not even Burmese want to live in a world controlledby a 1.4 billion strong ant-like harmonious ethnocentric societyfollowing ideological pheromones. Obama is doing serious Realpolitik(ask Metternich or even Machiavelli).

The truth is that Beijing pushed Myanmar into liberalizing. Opening up is best for everyone - China cannot and should not carry the entire load of modernizing Myanmar. Let the Westerners pull some weight. The Chinese firms already have a great head start. A richer Myanmar would mean better lives for the people, and a bigger market for Made in China, especially military goods. No matter how you look at it, opening up Myanmar makes lots of sense for Beijing.

What's next? MORE trade, more development, and better lives for all. As to what form of government Myanmar wants, it is up to the nation to work out for itself.

It's the hypocrisy, self-righteousness, ethnocentricity and lack of knowledge/sensitivity
about other cultures/religions (especially the non-Western ones) of the
Chinese Communist government (and most Han-Chinese) that makes the rest
of the world (including other Asians like me), feel uneasy.
It's great to be patriotic and have all these Guns and Money to
show off, but it might just scare people from other less powerful
countries (not everyone is an American or Chinese), especially if you
are 1.5 billion strong (including the millions of expatriate "loyal" Chinese)
and have grandiose plans to be a dominating superpower.

@BajieZhu We need to do only 2 day work/person/year doing only BEST products, which components fit to each others like Lego parts. Only proplem is, that not humans are playing everything to themselves doing history (and bredings), where such ones change awareness be such, that they are humans, because ANY REFERENCE or disident to say something elese and exist to be alternative choise to CARE folk (instead that from folk always are found stubidity, with which can go), who are then those catch. So what were your proplem and the truths what you are talking?